Climate Craziness of the Week: Eat bugs, not meat, to “save the planet”

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Anthony Watts

Mmmm....Insect variety plate - Image via kittymowmow.com - click

From Mongabay: Scientists in the Netherlands have discovered that insects produce significantly less greenhouse gas per kilogram of meat than cattle or pigs. Their study, published in the online journal PLoS, suggests that a move towards insect farming could result in a more sustainable — and affordable — form of meat production.

 

The rearing of cattle and pigs for meat production results in an estimated 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. With worldwide consumption of beef and pork expected to double by 2020, alternatives are being investigated. Of these, perhaps the most notable has been the development of “in-vitro meat” which is lab-grown tissue not requiring the production of a whole organism. Initiated by NASA as a form of astronaut food, in-vitro meat production took its first steps in 2000 when scientists used goldfish cells to grow edible protein resembling fish fillets. Since then, turkey and pig cells have been used to create spam-like substances, and Time Magazine has included in-vitro meat in its list of the top 50 breakthrough ideas of 2009.

Here’s the fixins: Continue reading →


Posted in Agriculture, Climate Craziness of the Week, GLOC | Tagged , , , , | 18 Comments

Thunderstorms proven to create antimatter

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Anthony Watts

Thunderstorms have been shown to create positrons and send them to space. As the late, great, Johnny Carson of the Tonight Show used to say, “That is some weird, wild, stuff“.

NASA’s Fermi Catches Thunderstorms Hurling Antimatter into Space

TGFs produce high-energy electrons and positrons. Moving near the speed of light, these particles travel into space along Earth's magnetic field. High Energy Electrons in yellow, positrons in green- click to enlarge

Scientists using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected beams of antimatter produced above thunderstorms on Earth, a phenomenon never seen before.

Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF), a brief burst produced inside thunderstorms and shown to be associated with lightning. It is estimated that about 500 TGFs occur daily worldwide, but most go undetected.

“These signals are the first direct evidence that thunderstorms make antimatter particle beams,” said Michael Briggs, a member of Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). He presented the findings Monday, during a news briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

Continue reading →

Posted in Science | Tagged , , , , , | 15 Comments

Can Most Of The Rise In The Satellite-Era Surface Temperatures Be Explained Without Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gases?

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Anthony Watts
The last 25 years of temperature variation

Satellite-Era Surface Temperature Record - Image via Wikipedia

Guest post by Bob Tisdale

In this post, I divide the globe (60S-60N) into two subsets and remove the linear effects of ENSO and volcanic eruptions from GISS Land-Ocean Temperature Index data since 1982. This is done using common methods. I further adjust the data to account for secondary ENSO-related processes. The Sea Surface Temperature subsets used for these adjustments are identified. The processes are briefly discussed, supported by links to past posts, and the data are presented that support the existence of these secondary effects. An additional volcanic aerosol refinement that increases the global trend is made. The bottom line is, the GISS LOTI and Reynolds OI.v2 SST data indicates that natural variables could be responsible for approximately 85% of the rise in global surface temperature since 1982. I’ll be the first to point out that I qualified my last sentence with the word “could”. This post illustrates a story presented by the data, nothing more. But this basic evaluation indicates these secondary effects of ENSO require further research.

This post continues with the two-year series of posts that basically illustrate that the effects of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cannot be accounted for using a single index like a commonly used SST-based dataset such as NINO3.4, or CTI, or MEI. These indices represent only the sea surface temperature of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific (that’s modified in the case of the MEI). They do not represent the process of ENSO. They do not account for the warm water that is returned to the western Pacific and redistributed during the La Niña. This post provides further evidence of those effects.

This post is long but I elected not to divide it in two. It’s 6,000 words or 13 single-spaced pages in length. It includes 32 Figures, a gif animation, and a video. So there’s a lot to digest. I tried to anticipate questions and answer them.

Continue reading →

Posted in ENSO, Sea Surface Temperature | Tagged , , , , | 87 Comments

UK Parliamentary Committee Asked To Probe Winter Transport Fiasco

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Anthony Watts
Global Warming Policy Foundation

Image via Wikipedia

Met Office on the hot seat. From the GWPF:

Liverpool Echo, 10 January 2011 by Ian Hernon

A LIVERPOOL MP is set to head a Parliamentary probe into this winter’s transport “fiasco.” Riverside’s Louise Ellman, as chairman of the Transport Select committee, has received official requests to launch a wide-ranging inquiry into why snowfalls up to the Christmas/New Year break crippled the rail and road system. If given the go-ahead it will focus on the coalition government’s alleged failure to respond to Met Office warnings of severe weather.

That led to weeks of turmoil with trains cancelled, motorways shut and thousands of travellers stranded in appalling weather.

Mrs Ellman has circulated complaints to committee members from all major parties and they will decide whether they merit a full-blown investigation.

She said: “The committee has not yet decided on an inquiry but it is certainly being considered.” Continue reading →

Posted in forecasting, politics | Tagged , , , , , | 53 Comments

Abandon all hope, ye who read this

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Anthony Watts

Climate change to continue to year 3000 in best case scenarios

New paper in Nature Geoscience examines inertia of carbon dioxide emissions

New research indicates the impact of rising CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere will cause unstoppable effects to the climate for at least the next 1000 years, causing researchers to estimate a collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet by the year 3000, and an eventual rise in the global sea level of at least four metres.

The study, to be published in the Jan. 9 Advanced Online Publication of the journal Nature Geoscience, is the first full climate model simulation to make predictions out to 1000 years from now. It is based on best-case, ‘zero-emissions’ scenarios constructed by a team of researchers from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis (an Environment Canada research lab at the University of Victoria) and the University of Calgary. Continue reading →

Posted in climate_change, Disaster, post-normal science, satire | Tagged , , | 211 Comments

Snow hits the south – air travel woes coming

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Anthony Watts

Image from 11:27 PM EST Sunday night

Expect a really ugly day for air travel on Monday as Atlanta’s forecast is not one of encouragement, and we all know just how important Atlanta is an a regional air hub.

From NWS Atlanta/Peachtree City, GA: Continue reading →

Posted in snowfall, weather | 41 Comments

The Met Office ‘secret’ prediction and the political implications

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Barry Woods

The UK Met Office

Guest Post by Barry Woods

In The Telegraph (UK newspaper), it was reported that Roger Harrabin, an environment analyst at the BBC, told the Radio Times:

“The trouble is that we simply don’t know how much to trust the Met Office. How often does it get the weather right and wrong. And we don’t know how it compares with other, independent forecasters.” – The Telegraph

Boris Johnson – The Mayor of London, is arguably perhaps the most democratically personally elected politician in the UK. As over 1.1 million London voters voted for him directly for the elected office of Mayor. This is compared to a UK Member of Parliament, who might win their seat with as little as 20,000 votes. In many seats, if you wore the right party badge a ‘mascot’ might get elected. Whilst the public are voting for a person, it is the party they represent that is being voted for.

In my opinion, no other Conservative candidate could have won that election to become Mayor, at a time (May 2008) when the Labour Party were still very much in power in the UK. Boris Johnson won peoples votes despite him being a Conservative for many members of the public that voted for him.

Thus, for a high profile Conservative like Boris to write glowingly about (arch sceptic) Piers Corbyn and criticise the Met Office, is in my opinion very significant politically in the UK. Especially in light of the fact that Boris wrote this before the Met Office started denying they had predicted mild winters and before their ‘secret’ prediction statement.

Continue reading →

Posted in forecasting, media | Tagged , , , , , , | 100 Comments

My best computer upgrade, evah

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Anthony Watts

The solid state hard drive comes of age

I spend a lot of time at my PC, and I use quite a number of programs in my tasks at keeping WUWT updated. I use browsers, word editors, PDF viewers, paint programs, graphing programs, Google Earth, and an MP3 recorder/editor for my daily radio forecasts. My PC gets a real workout daily.

With so much to do, I’ve noted that I get impatient just waiting on things to load these days. And so after some trepidation and research, I took the plunge and bought myself a solid state hard disk replacement for my Windows 7 HP slimline desktop in hopes it would speed my tasks. I’m happy to report the results significantly exceeded my expectations and I thought WUWT readers could benefit from my experience. Every one of my readers has a computer, so what better post could I make than something that shows them how to be happier using it? Continue reading →

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , | 108 Comments

Met office: you want fries with that freeze?

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Anthony Watts

Future home of the Met Office? Image via Flickr, Pat Martin - click

The Met Office fries while the rest of the world freezes

 

By Christopher Booker (excerpt from his Telegraph column)

First it was a national joke. Then its professional failings became a national disaster. Now, the dishonesty of its attempts to fight off a barrage of criticism has become a real national scandal. I am talking yet again of that sad organisation the UK Met Office, as it now defends its bizarre record with claims as embarrassingly absurd as any which can ever have been made by highly-paid government officials. Continue reading →

Posted in Opinion, satire | Tagged , , , | 78 Comments

Poo Gloo Gaia Pans

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Anthony Watts

Sorry for the title, I couldn’t resist. This article is calling to Mike Rowe, of “Dirty Jobs” fame, who makes “poo” his specialty. While this brown, er green, story isn’t our normal fare on WUWT, but I found it interesting. Public sanitation systems have done more to advance public health and longevity than any other modern convenience, and recently some eco zealot who got a guest post in the Guardian during COP16 called for “…radically abandoning the flush toilet – one of the world’s most destructive habits“. Well poo on him, maybe he needs to check out the Poo Gloo. – Anthony

Igloo-shaped ‘Poo-Gloos’ eat sewage

Growing towns can save mllions; study shows devices cut pollutants

Poo-Gloos -- inexpensive devices to extend the lifespan of sewage lagoons for towns and small cities outgrowing their waste-treatment facilities -- are half submerged as officials fill this sewage lagoon in Wellsville, Utah. The igloo-shaped devices are submerged when operating, and a new study shows they remove organic waste and other pollutants from sewage just as well as much more expensive mechanical sewage-treatment plants.

SALT LAKE CITY, January 10, 2011 – Inexpensive igloo-shaped, pollution-eating devices nicknamed “Poo-Gloos” can clean up sewage just as effectively as multimillion-dollar treatment facilities for towns outgrowing their waste-treatment lagoons, according to a new study.

“The results of this study show that it is possible to save communities with existing lagoon systems hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, by retrofitting their existing wastewater treatment facilities with Poo-Gloos,” says Fred Jaeger, chief executive officer of Wastewater Compliance Systems, Inc., which sells the Poo-Gloo under the name Bio-Dome. Continue reading →

Posted in economy-health | Tagged , , , , , | 72 Comments

Monckton skewers Steketee

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Anthony Watts

Click for PDF version

2010 WAS THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD
by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

 

Michael Steketee, writing in The Australian in January 2011, echoed the BBC (whose journalists’ pension fund is heavily weighted towards “green” “investments”) and other climate-extremist vested interests in claiming that 2010 was the warmest year on record worldwide. Mr. Steketee’s short article makes two dozen questionable assertions, which either require heavy qualification or are downright false. His assertions will be printed in bold face: the truth will appear in Roman face.

1. BASED ON PRELIMINARY DATA TO NOVEMBER 30, SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURES AROUND AUSTRALIA WERE THE WARMEST ON RECORD LAST YEAR, AS WERE THOSE FOR THE PAST DECADE.
The record only began ten decades ago. As for sea temperatures, they are less significant for analyzing “global warming” than estimated total ocean heat content. A recent paper by Professors David Douglass and Robert Knox of Rochester University, New York, has established that – contrary to various climate-extremist assertions – there has been no net accumulation of “missing energy” in the form of heat in the oceans worldwide in the six years since ocean heat content was first reliably measured by the 3000 automated ARGO bathythermographs in 2003. This finding implies that the amount of warming we can expect from even quite a large increase in CO2 concentration is far less than the IPCC and other climate-extremist groups maintain.

Continue reading →

Posted in media, Opinion | Tagged , , | 163 Comments

College students lack scientific literacy, study finds

Posted on January 8, 2011 by Anthony Watts
This carbon cycle diagram shows the storage an...

The study said: "Most students didn't truly understand processes that transform carbon". The carbon cycle is shown above - click to enlarge - Image via Wikipedia

After reading this I asked myself: Is it any wonder college students get sucked in to emotionally based eco-causes/NGO’s that spout claims based on questionable science?  This troubling press release comes from Michigan State University. A link to the full paper follows below, which is well worth reading because it gives insight into the questions and answers given. It is quite an eye-opener. – Anthony

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Most college students in the United States do not grasp the scientific basis of the carbon cycle – an essential skill in understanding the causes and consequences of climate change, according to research published in the January issue of BioScience.

The study, whose authors include several current and former researchers from Michigan State University, calls for a new way of teaching – and, ultimately, comprehending – fundamental scientific principles such as the conservation of matter.

“Improving students’ understanding of these biological principles could make them better prepared to deal with important environmental issues such as global climate change,” said Charles “Andy” Anderson, MSU professor of teacher education and co-investigator on the project.

Continue reading →

Posted in education | Tagged , , | 100 Comments

Moon revealed to have an Earth-like core

Posted on January 8, 2011 by Anthony Watts

NASA Research Team Reveals Moon Has Earth-Like Core

WASHINGTON – State-of-the-art seismological techniques applied to Apollo-era data suggest our moon has a core similar to Earth’s.

Uncovering details about the lunar core is critical for developing accurate models of the moon’s formation. The data sheds light on the evolution of a lunar dynamo — a natural process by which our moon may have generated and maintained its own strong magnetic field. Continue reading →

Posted in Science, space | Tagged , , | 37 Comments

New rate of stratospheric photolysis questions ozone hole

Posted on January 8, 2011 by Anthony Watts

These images show its size each September over the past years, as derived from GOME, GOME-2 and SCIAMACHY satellite data. - click to enlarge

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow

 

Dr. Will Happer of Princeton wrote “The Montreal Protocol to ban freons was the warm-up exercise for the IPCC.  Many current IPCC players gained fame then by stampeding the US Congress into supporting the Montreal Protocol. They learned to use dramatized, phony scientific claims like “ozone holes over Kennebunkport” (President Bush Sr’s seaside residence in New England). The ozone crusade also had business opportunities for firms like Dupont to market proprietary “ozone-friendly” refrigerants at much better prices than the conventional (and more easily used) freons that had long-since lost patent protection and were not a cheap commodity with little profit potential” (link).

Even James Lovelock agrees. James Lovelock formulated the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the biosphere is a self-regulating entity with the capacity to keep our planet healthy by controlling the chemical and physical environment. He later became concerned that global warming would upset the balance and leave only the arctic as habitable. He began to move off this position in 2007 suggesting that the Earth itself is in “no danger” because it would stabilize in a new state.

James Lovelock’s reaction to first reading about the CRU emails in late 2009 was one of a true scientist: Continue reading →

Posted in CFC's, ozone | Tagged , , , , , , | 169 Comments

Putting the Brakes on Acceleration

Posted on January 8, 2011 by Willis Eschenbach

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

Various pundits and scientists keep talking about a threatened acceleration in the sea level rise. Here’s the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report:

Anthropogenic forcing is also expected to produce an accelerating rate of sea level rise (Woodworth et al., 2004).

The usual font of misinformation says:

Church and White (2006) report an acceleration of SLR since 1870. This is a revision since 2001, when the TAR stated that measurements have detected no significant acceleration in the recent rate of sea level rise.

Over at the inversely named “SkepticalScience” blog, which is inadequately skeptical, we find:

The blue line in the graph below clearly shows sea level as rising, while the upward curve suggests sea level is rising faster as time goes on. The upward curve agrees with global temperature trends and with the accelerating melting of ice in Greenland and other places.

The Guardian gets in their licks:

Sea levels are already on the rise as a result of increasing temperatures, because the oceans expand as they warm up, but until now scientists have had a poor understanding of how quickly ice sheets such as those in Greenland and Antarctica will begin to disappear.

Meanwhile, back in the world of reality we have the latest satellite data up to September of 2010: Continue reading →

Posted in sea level | Tagged , , | 158 Comments

Most energetic particles ever from a celestial object

Posted on January 8, 2011 by Anthony Watts

Fermi's Large Area Telescope has recently detected two short-duration gamma-ray pulses coming from the Crab Nebula, which was previously believed to emit radiation at very steady rate. The pulses were fueled by the most energetic particles ever traced to a discrete astronomical object. (Image courtesy NASA/ESA.)

Our last story was about crabs, so is this one. I’m sure we’ll figure out a way to work in lobsters soon too. From the Stanford Linear ACcellerator Lab (SLAC):

Fermi’s Large Area Telescope Sees Surprising Flares in Crab Nebula

Menlo Park, Calif.—The Crab Nebula, one of our best-known and most stable neighbors in the winter sky, is shocking scientists with its propensity for fireworks—gamma-ray flares set off by the most energetic particles ever traced to a specific astronomical object. The discovery, reported today by scientists working with two orbiting telescopes, is leading researchers to rethink their ideas of how cosmic particles are accelerated.

“We were dumbfounded,” said Roger Blandford, who directs the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, jointly located at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University. “It’s an emblematic object,” he said. The Crab Nebula, also known as M1, was the first astronomical object catalogued in 1771 by Charles Messier. “It’s a big deal historically,” Blandford continued, “and we’re making an amazing discovery about it.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Science, space | Tagged , , , , | 54 Comments

Deadliest Catch-22

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Anthony Watts

Image: Thanet Coast Project

You can’t make this stuff up, really. Crab deaths due to cold according to one authority are now being blamed on….drum roll….climate change aka global warming, by another.

 

“Thousands of dead crabs have washed up along the Kent coast, with environmental experts believing the cold weather in Britain is to blame,” London’s Daily Mail reports. In an MSNBC/LiveScience report, we get the simple explanation. ’tis the snowfall on the beach that melted wot dun it:

“It’s been a phenomenon for probably a third year in a row,” Tony Child, Thanet Coast project manager, told LiveScience.

The crabs come closer to shore at this time of year, Child said, where they feed on the seaweed. In the past, environmental scientists ran tests to check for disease or other physiological problems with the crabs, coming up empty-handed. But Child said every year the die-offs have occurred after there was snow on the beaches. The meltwater causes temperatures near shore to drop, and Child said the deaths must be linked to hypothermia.

Now, get  load of this quote from another person in the Daily Mail Article: Continue reading →

Posted in Alarmism, ridiculae | Tagged , , , , , , | 118 Comments

The “next big thing”: a carbon swap bank

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Anthony Watts

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/carboncreditcertificate.jpg?w=500&h=382&h=382

Via Eurekalert: Carbon swap bank to beat climate change

Could swapping carbon emissions rather than trading them reduce climate change?

Australian researchers have suggested that nations should abandon the concept of carbon emissions trading in favor of a carbon swap bank that might lead to genuine reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide greenhouse gas entering the atmosphere and so provide a mechanism for reducing climate change. Details of the carbon swap bank are outlined in the journal Interdisciplinary Environmental Review.

Carbon emissions trading was to be the economic environmental solution to climate change. The original impetus of the Copenhagen Treaty in 2010 was to mitigate rising global average temperature by allowing nations that reduced their carbon emissions to trade with other nations and so motivate all nations to find ways of cutting pollution. The idea for an emission trading scheme first emerged in the 1960s in the USA. “Cap and trade” was essentially an invention of economists, and in particular, Canadian economist JH Dales in 1968. The first such cap-and-trade system was launched as part of the US Acid Rain Program in Title IV of the 1990 Clean Air Act but similar schemes have been mooted in the face of global warming.

Continue reading →

Posted in carbon credits | Tagged , , | 55 Comments

Climate Craziness of the week: a basic science question for NYT reporter Justin Gillis

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Anthony Watts

Readers please note the story I ran earlier: NOAA: “the atmosphere’s self-cleaning capacity is rather stable”

This story talks about the ability of hydroxyl radicals in the free atmosphere to break down pollutants, and how there seems to be a stability in the levels globally, something understood for the first time. All good news.

Now read what this New York Times reporter, Assistant Business Editor Justin Gillis, bemoans in his story here:

A Steady Dose of Atmospheric Detergent

He writes: Continue reading →

Posted in Climate Craziness of the Week | Tagged , , , , | 128 Comments

Longstanding Mystery of Sun’s Hot Outer Atmosphere Solved

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Anthony Watts

From the National Science Foundation:

Answer lies in jets of plasma

Images showing narrow jets of material streaking upward from the Sun's surface at high speeds.

Narrow jets of material, called spicules, streak upward from the Sun's surface at high speeds. Credit: NASA - click to enlarge

One of the most enduring mysteries in solar physics is why the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, is millions of degrees hotter than its surface.

Now scientists believe they have discovered a major source of hot gas that replenishes the corona: jets of plasma shooting up from just above the Sun’s surface.

The finding addresses a fundamental question in astrophysics: how energy is moved from the Sun’s interior to create its hot outer atmosphere.

“It’s always been quite a puzzle to figure out why the Sun’s atmosphere is hotter than its surface,” says Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist at the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., who was involved in the study.

Continue reading →

Posted in Science, solar | Tagged , , , , , | 254 Comments